Levine: Triple Crown for Astros' Berkman unlikely

While there's a tiny chance Astros slugger Lance Berkman (shown Friday) will become the first Triple Crown winner since 1967, there's a very good chance there will be a summer full of conversations about one of baseball's most elusive feats, columnist Zachary Levine writes. less

While there's a tiny chance Astros slugger Lance Berkman (shown Friday) will become the first Triple Crown winner since 1967, there's a very good chance there will be a summer full of conversations about one of ... more

Photo: LM Otero, AP

Photo: LM Otero, AP

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While there's a tiny chance Astros slugger Lance Berkman (shown Friday) will become the first Triple Crown winner since 1967, there's a very good chance there will be a summer full of conversations about one of baseball's most elusive feats, columnist Zachary Levine writes. less

While there's a tiny chance Astros slugger Lance Berkman (shown Friday) will become the first Triple Crown winner since 1967, there's a very good chance there will be a summer full of conversations about one of ... more

Photo: LM Otero, AP

Levine: Triple Crown for Astros' Berkman unlikely

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It's a little early to start thinking ahead to a Triple Crown.

Are you kidding? Big Brown's already two-thirds of the way there.

No, it's a little early, in that Lance Berkman still has to hold off the rest of the NL in RBIs and home runs for four more months and find a way to catch Chipper Jones in batting average.

While there's a tiny chance Berkman will become the first Triple Crown winner since 1967 and the first in the NL since 1937, there's a very good chance there will be a summer full of conversations about one of baseball's most elusive feats.

So to help you out at the water cooler or the chat room, here are three things to know about the Triple Crown.

As strange a sentence as this is to read, the closest we've ever had to a Triple Crown winner coming out of nowhere was Frank Robinson, one of the greatest hitters to play the game.

Robinson is the only player in the AL-NL era (since 1901) to win the Triple Crown without having been a batting champ, home run leader or RBI leader beforehand. He hadn't even been a top-10 player in the last two categories.

And just for good measure, even as he retired fourth on the all-time home run list and 12th on the RBI list, he never won another crown of any of the three categories.

A telltale tip

2. RBIs the best indicator:

Berkman wouldn't have to duplicate Robinson's feat — he has an RBI title under his belt, having knocked in 128 in 2002.

Of the three Triple Crown categories, past RBIs have proven to be the best indicator of when a Triple Crown winner might be on the horizon.

The 11 first-time winners of the modern era combined for six batting titles and seven home run titles before they broke through with the first Triple Crown.

But they combined for 13 league titles in RBIs, which require both power and consistency to get to the top, just like the Triple Crown.

3. Nobody has come close lately:

While the term "Triple Crown" has been thrown around during Berkman's tear through the month of May and better than 60 percent of respondents in a hardly scientific FSN Houston poll believed Berkman would do it, it's hard to get excited just yet.

No, Jones isn't going to hit over .420, and Berkman's not going to get many days off and will have Miguel Tejada on base for him with regularity.

But it's still nearly impossible.

Since Carl Yastrzemski went .326/44/121 in 1967, nobody has come all that close.

Thirty-seven times since 1967, a player has finished in his league's top five in all three categories, from Willie Horton in 1968 to Cecil Cooper in 1982 and to the present with Matt Holliday last year.

But it goes down rapidly from there. Twenty-seven times a player has finished in the top four across the board, 12 times in the top three and just once in the top two.

Even Bags couldn't

And many of you will remember that, though it has an asterisk.

In the strike-shortened 1994 season, unanimous NL MVP Jeff Bagwell led the league with 116 RBIs in just 110 games. He was second with 39 homers, four shy of Matt Williams and was a distant second to Tony Gwynn's .394 with his .368 average.

But the strike actually aided his Triple Crown ranks in retrospect, preventing the rest of the league from catching up after Bagwell broke his hand two days before the strike. If the players hadn't walked out, Bagwell would have slipped in the two raw number categories thanks to a wayward Andy Benes pitch.

It just goes to show what kind of little obstacles Berkman will face in the last three-quarters of the season in addition to the big obstacle of continuing his scorching pace.